What WeWork’s failure tells us about beanbags in offices
The pandemic burst the illusion that people want to live at work and most companies now have a hybrid working policy, with employees coming to the office far less.
Founded in 2010, co-working space WeWork was the flag-bearer for the sort of open-plan, progressive workplace that provided daily Bikram yoga classes and served beer at 3pm on a Friday. It emerged in the era of big tech campuses with ping-pong tables and sushi bars, as parodied by the 2014 HBO series Silicon Valley.
At its peak, WeWork had 500,000 users in 111 cities buying into its vision of a “capitalist kibbutz”. But its long-haired, bare-footed founder Adam Neumann didn’t want to stop there – he wanted to “change the world” by bringing people together “in the work environment”.
